If there is any sensible reason at all to navigate 8,700 miles to cold isolated Antarctica — to spend 10 days on a plane and a former Russian vessel from the Cold War just to get there — running 13.1 miles is probably not high on the list.

Scientists with Ph.Ds studying climate change and geophysics, fine. Those who work in the Amarillo school district’s digital learning department to run a half-marathon, not so much.

But that’s where Mindy Montano found herself on March 10 with 96 other runners for the Antarctica Marathon and Half-Marathon on King George Island. It’s not the end of the earth, but you can see it from there. Well, actually it is the end of the earth.

“People were asking me if I was going to Antarctica,” said Sylvia Montano, who accompanied her daughter, “and I said I was. They would say, ‘They have a marathon in Antarctica?’ Yes, they apparently do.”

When one of the cross-outs on her daughter’s bucket list is to run seven half-marathons in seven continents, and Antarctica being a continent, well, there’s not much choice but to be at the starting line that day. For Montano, this lofty goal of seven on seven ironically came from an idea while in warm Hawaii.

It was the Big Island International Marathon and Half Marathon in Hilo in 2008. A man there told Montano he was pursuing 50 marathons in the 50 states.

“Good gosh, I thought that was a lot,” said Montano, 38. “But for some reason, I thought there are only seven continents, so I could try seven halves.

“Later I realized there are a couple of thousand around the world with the same goal, but it seemed like something I could achieve, and wanted to achieve. So I decided to go for it.”

Scrimping and saving, Montano’s adventure has taken her and parents Sylvia and Louis about 77,400 miles over the last six years. With North America out of the way, she ran Asia’s Great Wall of China in 2009, which included some steps along the wall and three miles running beside it.

There was Africa’s Safaricom in Kenya in 2010, run on an actual safari where a helicopter buzzed the course two hours before to scare off rhinos, big cats and elephants. Just in case, armed guards were at each water stop. Keep your head on a swivel.

There was the half in South America’s Rio de Janiero in Brazil in 2011.

In 2012, Montano ran her only 26.2-mile marathon in the pursuit, getting Europe out of the way in the Stockholm Jubilee in Sweden.

It was the 100th anniversary of the 1912 Stockholm Olympics where runners started and finished inside the ancient stadium and ran the exact course of a century previous.

There was an extended timeout in 2013 for hip surgery. Two continents remained. Montano, former basketball standout at Caprock, trained by herself in the Amarillo winter to prepare as best she could. But how much would it help?

“I was expecting brutal cold, to be honest,” she said.

Instead, in the window of running time, it was a freakish 30 degrees. Still, it was an odd event. For one thing, all the different countries with research stations look at anyone else as interlopers.

Because no more than 100 could run at one time, two races were held on separate days. There was to be no evidence of a race so no water stations, no paper cups or packets of any kind. Carry your own water bottle.

It wasn’t exactly running in a parka on an iceberg and dodging penguins, but overdressed in Gore-Tex running through muck, ice and some gravel, climbing steep hills, and jumping over streams that weren’t frozen.

“So much of the course was just mud,” she said, “the kind that would almost suck the shoes off your feet it was so thick and deep. There’s no way to prepare for that.”

Montano, who has run as fast as a very competitive one hour, 35 minutes, slogged through that in 2:39. They hustled back to the ship, beating snow and wind by a couple of hours.

“It was the experience of a lifetime to only see what you see in history books — the icebergs, the glaciers, the penguins,” said Montano, who later with her mother, sailed around the main continent.

Six down, one to go. That one is this July in the outback of Australia, the appropriately named Australian Outback Half Marathon in Terrigal, Australia.

“Once I cross the finish line there, it’s going to be a little overwhelming,” she said. “There will be a huge sense of accomplishment, and then a ‘what do I do now?’”

Jon Mark Beilue is an AGN Media columnist. He can be reached at jon.beilue@amarillo.com or 806-345-3318. His blog and video bog appear on amarillo.com. Follow him on Twitter @jonmarkbeilue.